


A Shifting Tempo

by patster223



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Marielda Spoilers, Marielda Zine, Recovery, deconstructing the dancer/dualist duality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 08:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12955758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patster223/pseuds/patster223
Summary: "We’re twins," Edmund protested. "We were born into duality.”“You were born into the world,” Samol corrected him. “Born into me. As for the rest of it-” Samol gestured toward the uncomfortable few feet that separated the brothers “-you found that all on your own.”Edmund and Ethan reconcile. Written for the Marielda Zine.





	A Shifting Tempo

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Marielda Zine--thanks to Jay for organizing it and making it such a fun process! Spoilers for all of Marielda.

“The thing about twins,” Samol said, “is that no one is quite sure what to do with them.”

“We know,” Ethan said, with a grin and a glance toward his brother. “It’s a handy advantage to have.”

“That’s only the case if _you_ know what to do with yourselves.”

“Of course we know what to do with ourselves,” the brothers said together—or, tried to say together. Normally, when they spoke as one, their words were a dance so well-choreographed that even their missteps seemed by design, included only to add a sense of suspense for the audience.

But this was after the death of Samothes. Now, their words simply clashed against each other like dull swords.

Samol sighed.

“I know all too well what it looks like when a pair of sons has found their way into a schism,” he said. “So pardon me if I don’t quite believe you.”

 _Schism._ The word felt sour on Edmund’s tongue. He’d never even known that such a word existed: one that so succinctly described the estrangement between two brothers.

  
***

  
Shortly after the Valentine Affair, Edmund had asked Aubrey how she could tell him and Ethan apart. At the time, he thought he’d only asked the question to fill the silence they’d both been mired in since Memoriam College.

Only later would he realize what his question had truly been: a desperate attempt to find that word. _Schism._

“Oh, there are lots of little ways,” Aubrey had answered. “But mostly, you just...move differently? You move like a dancer; he moves like a duelist.”

Before, that distinction--dancer and duelist--had seemed more of a playful game than anything else. Now it’d become something cold and tangible that lived in Edmund’s chest. On the days when he couldn’t get out of bed, it choked him, preventing him from doing anything more than pulling the bedsheets tighter around himself when Ethan called his name through the door.

Edmund simply couldn’t unsee it. Ethan _did_ move like a duelist. He was vicious and glorious, sidestepping everyone around him until he found the perfect opportunity to strike. And Edmund was the dancer, gracefully keeping time with everyone else, until--

Until he just couldn’t manage it anymore. Not with Ethan.

No, underneath the weight of a volcanic heat and one far more sinister than that; of crushing memories and the ambivalence of dying gods; of the realization that reconfiguration changed more than the shape and location of objects and buildings, but also the sound, the beat, the _pattern_ of everything in Marielda, _including_ relationships, including the rhythm between two brothers—

Underneath the weight of all of that, Edmund interrupted Ethan’s dance: a duelist in the end, if only for his brother.  
  


***  
  


“Now, I may not know what to do with you,” Samol continued. “But I do _know_ you. Other people…They mix you up, call you the wrong name. Give you different ones to make up for it: call one of you the duelist and the other the dancer. As if those two things are so different.”

Samol shook his head.

“But the thing about _names_ is that it’s easy to internalize them: to create a divide where there previously wasn’t. The Golden Lance and The Six, the duelist and the dancer, Samothes and Samot—we all create these dualities every day, and they are just as illusory as they are binding, just as attractive as they are _cruel._ ”

Ethan tutted, and Edmund got the feeling that this wasn’t the first speech of Samol’s that his brother had sat through. Edmund though—still feverish from wounds and half-remembered visions left over from Samothes’ forge—found his head swimming amongst Samol’s words.

“What does that even mean?” Edmund asked. “I mean, what does saying all that even do? You’re talking about duality, but—we’re _twins._ We were _born_ into duality.”

“You were born into the _world_ ,” Samol corrected him. “Born into _me._ As for the rest of it-” Samol gestured toward the uncomfortable few feet that separated the brothers “-you found that all on your own.”

  
***

  
The year before the killing of Samothes would forever be hazy in Edmund’s mind. All that he truly remembered was the strange rhythm of that quiet year: how he woke up every day only to find that another, seemingly insignificant sound had changed its tempo. The click of his and Ethan’s shoes, the clash of their swords, even the clinking of their tea spoons--all of them soon gained a strange reverb that rattled Edmund’s teeth.

He was sure that everyone else could hear it too. Hell, The Six even kept him company on the nights when he could do nothing more than stare at the wall and listen for those asynchronous sounds.

Castille sat with him the most often, though that was only because she had something to say. Edmund may have been soft, but he could tell that much.

It was on a quiet night when Castille finally said, with measured and careful words, “It must be hard sometimes: being two people.”

“It…We...” Edmund sighed. “Yeah.”

“How…how do you deal with it?”

“I’m not sure,” Edmund said. “And, these days…I’m not even sure what’s worse: being two people at once, or…or realizing that, this entire time, you were actually these separate, maybe incompatible things. And you’d never even noticed.”

“Yeah,” Castille murmured, before standing up and smoothing out her dress. “Yeah.”

The sound of a carriage’s creaking wheels drifted in from outside--and any response Edmund might’ve had for Castille was trapped underneath his tongue as the strange, shifting tempo of Marielda crept inside as well.  
  


***  
  


Samol left to tend to his garden, leaving behind an awkward silence that Edmund did not know how to fill. He’d never had to before with Ethan.

“Do you like it here?” Edmund tried. “In Samol’s house?”

Ethan laughed.

“What? I—Edmund, this is the _manor_ ,” he said. “The map, the treasure, the place our mother left for us to find—it’s all _here._ ”

Edmund’s vision swam with images of a little brown girl running around this very house with that confident young boy. He could practically see them now, moving just out of Ethan’s line of sight.

“Our mother,” Edmund said, voice tight, his words stuck in his still-scarred throat—

Ethan placed a warm hand on his shoulder. And Edmund continued.

“She told us these stories,” he said. “And then she left. And then our father told stories about those stories, and then _he_ left. We built our _life_ on those stories, on—his stories of her stories of her memories and—and look what happened! We’re in the house of a dying god whose son we…And now we’ve ended up just like them!”

He gestured to Samol in the garden, and then to the door, which led to the path, which led to the border of Marielda, which led to the tomb of Samothes and the palace of Samot.

“I’m not sure if I know how to do this anymore,” Edmund said. “I don’t know how to…live in a world where families keep their memories locked inside of active volcanoes.”

“Is that a metaphor?”

“ _God_ , I wish it were just a metaphor.”

“Edmund,” Ethan said, squeezing his brother’s shoulder. “We can’t figure out how to do anything if I have no clue what you’re talking about. Tell me what _happened_.”

Edmund did. He confessed the story of a priest in an operating theater, of haunted dreams, and of a blade in the dark: words and tears spilling out of him until the sound of his and Ethan’s breathing came into alignment once more.

  
***

 

It was so easy to be tempted toward confession when you were soft: _especially_ when you were soft because a priest tricked you. That was how Edmund found himself admitting the truth of his muddled dreams to Sige, as they tested the acoustics of their newly lacquered confessional booths.

“He knows we’re coming,” Edmund said. “Samothes knows, and--and he doesn’t even seem to care. It doesn’t seem like _anyone_ cares! How can you all be so calm about this?”

“Look, Hitchcock…” Sige said, his voice low both in an effort to calm Edmund and keep the library’s silence. “I know things are rough right now. But I _also_ know that, when push comes to shove, you and I will back each other up in a fight. Sometimes staying calm is as simple as that.”

“I’m secretly twins!” Edmund protested. “And we’re going to kill a god! None of this is simple! It is so _very_ complicated!”

“I—of course all of that’s complicated!” Sige said, finally raising his voice enough to vibrate the thin wooden wall between them. “This plan is complicated and bad; this entire _city_ is complicated and bad, and it makes everything inside of it that way too, but...doing the right thing and living with myself at the end of the fucking day can’t get caught up in all of that. That part _has_ to stay simple, Hitchcock.”

Edmund wished that he knew how to feel that way. All he knew was how to prepare for the end—

But then, when that end didn’t come, when life went on after the death of a god, he found himself lost yet again. Sige, Castille, and Aubrey all found new causes to champion in Marielda, but something in Edmund had called him away from this place. It called him to leave the city whose song no longer recognized and move toward a path, toward a manor in the woods, toward a brother whose presence he simply longed for: even after everything that’d happened.  
  


***  
  


When Edmund finally ran out of secrets to share, the brothers sat in silence for a long moment before Ethan shook his head.

“You know, if you’d just told me all this…” Ethan let out a long exhale. “I don’t know, Edmund. Maybe we should have just stuck to stealing trains.”

“But it was _his_ train. Don’t you see? _He_ told me we were coming and then we used _his_ train, and—it didn’t seem like there was any way to stop it all.”

“It was _Samothes_. If he’d wanted to stop it, he could have. He just…didn’t.”

“Don’t act like you’re so dismissive of them. You were always too faithful by half,” Edmund said. “Dragging us into his cavalry like that.”

“I’ve never been too faithful,” Ethan said. “I just knew that I looked good in a cavalry uniform. Just like Samothes’ candlestick looks good in my bag and just like I look good resting in a god’s house.”

“ _Are_ we at rest?”

“You tell me.”

As if on cue, Samol’s guitar drifted in from the garden: a simple waltz.

Edmund glanced to the window. “Are we supposed to dance?”

“We aren’t _supposed_ to do anything. We do as we please.”

Nonetheless, Ethan extended a hand to Edmund. Edmund accepted it, allowing his brother to lead him in a dance around the room.

There was supposed to be a schism between them—this great chasm—but instead of their feet sinking into it as Edmund half-expected them to, they instead slid into a familiar pattern. The brothers took turns leading, the shift of their leather boots and the creaking of wooden floorboards forming a soft and easy language between them as their chests rose and fell to the steady metronome of Samol’s guitar.

“I don’t know if we’re at rest,” Edmund finally said. “I think it’s more like a pause. It’s the breath you take after a series of fervent steps before you’re forced to move again.”

“In swordplay or in dance?”

“Does it matter anymore?”

Ethan grinned. “I’m not Samol; I don’t know about the philosophies of these kinds of things. I like a good rousing speech, but not the existential kind he makes. Nah, Edmund. Swordplay, dance—I think they’re all just moves we’re making.”

And soon, they would move again. They would step into some new dance of living and working and making new stories for Samol to tell other the strange souls who ended up in his manor—but, for now, they simply rested and paused and shifted their feet to the sounds of an old house, a guitar, and a conversation long overdue.


End file.
